Kimberlé Crenshaw: Up in Arms, a Conversation About Women and Weapons

The Female Fighter Series is published in partnership with the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative and V-Day: A Global Movement to End Violence Against Women and Girls. 

In Jamaica, many years ago, legal scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw critiqued an essay of mine, on the lives of female fighters. About the emotional capital built up in the telling of the women’s stories she suggested, “Sacrifice it. And build up political capital, an ask for action.”

The advice was, in retrospect, not surprising. Crenshaw was and remains steadfast in her focus on the political impact a violent society, and state, has on black women. Crenshaw, renowned for coining the term “intersectionality” over two decades ago, has pulled her theories into the practice of an overtly political feminist practice.

As the racial divide in the United States deepens, black women are increasingly taking up arms. According to data released by the Texas Department of Public Safety, black women are one of the fastest-growing demographic groups to obtain permits to carry a concealed weapon. Like combatant women elsewhere, these civilian women cite the necessity of carrying a gun—for protection and power. Crenshaw is a critical voice in understanding this trend, and the driving forces behind it.

For most American audiences, the female fighter exists in a land far, far away. To consider female militancy in this country, in our movements, requires a reckoning: the need to see police brutality against black women as state violence, checkpoints in school cafeterias as militarization, and the death rates from domestic and mass violence as mimicking those of a warzone.

The first piece in Guernica’s “Female Fighter” series, authored by Valeria Luiselli, focused on Sandra, a senior fighter in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In a subsequent conversation with Sandra on black women in the United States, she told me, “(They) are very strong, they have guts. But they can still engage in the political struggle without arms.” Militancy is always a moment in the movement. The choice to take up arms is a considered one. “Arms should not be the absolute answer,” Sandra later added, in a cautionary tone. “One should only take up arms when there is no other answer.”

For black women in the US,